Drawing Dead (7 page)

“How did that all play out?” Tiger asked.

“Fred Hampton was killed in a police raid. The police said a tipster told them he was stockpiling bombs. The house he was living in was hit with enough rounds to kill a whole village. The ground-level belief is that it was an assassination. Cold-blooded slaughter. Either way, that was pretty much the end for the Panthers here.”

“So those black boulders—”

“Blackstone Rangers. The mural is saying
they
were the so-called tipsters. It was an everybody-wins deal. The Rangers re-invented themselves a number of times. But any claim that BOSS was some kind of patriotic force within the Chicago PD kind of went to hell when some of the Rangers made a deal with Qaddafi to blow up Sears Tower.”

“What
]
”

“It's well documented, Tiger,” Rhino said calmly. “And this was
decades
before the World Trade Center. Qaddafi was a madman—Osama Bin Ladin to the tenth degree. It was his vision that he could become the World Leader of All Muslims, the Ultimate Ayatollah. That's why he financed the Lockerbie bombing…and who knows what else.

“Whether he was sending troops over the border to ‘reclaim' Chad or paying famous people to entertain at his parties, being insane was always in there, somewhere.”

“That's him, over in the left-hand corner?” Cross asked, indicating a man dressed in traditional Muslim robes but wearing what looked like a yacht captain's hat.

“Yes. That mural, it's a connect-the-dots piece. Those young white people over to the other side—see the jail bars in front of some of the images? And the others kind of clumped together in some banquet room? Mural Girl, she's saying calling them all ‘revolutionaries' doesn't make them comrades. Some came in from being on the run, worked out no-jail deals, wrote their books. But not all of them had those options. Some are dead from gunfire, some still doing their life sentences.”

“So the message of that mural is supposed to be…what?”

“That's not what's important,” Tiger said, confidence back in her voice. “Watch this.”

The screen flickered. The image of the mural disappeared. In its place, a fan of five cards: three aces, two eights.

“A full house,” Cross said. “Poker. Not those blackjack hands like before.”

“Look closer,” Rhino said. “All three aces are spades, both eights are hearts.”

“Dead man's hand,” Cross said softly, “only with an extra ace. It's not hard to read, not now. But how's this help us?”

As he spoke, the cards vanished and the mural reappeared.

“I don't know,” Rhino said. “But they…whoever they are, they've got their eye on Mural Girl.”

“Five cards, Cross,” Tiger said, so softly she might have been speaking to herself. “Like Buddha said before, five OGs. So maybe they're making sure you understand who their message is
for.
”

FOR THE
working outlaw, midnight is morning; darkness is dawn.

“It ain't like last time,” Ace said. “Not even close.”

“Because last time
we
jumped it off? That whole ‘urban renewal' deal So Long cooked up?”

“Hey! That brought in a nice chunk,” Buddha said, defending his wife, a beautiful, seemingly ageless woman who wore larceny as another might wear lipstick.

“Okay!”
Cross shut down any potential sidetracks. “That doesn't matter. Those cards, sure, that has to be a message from…I don't know what to call them…‘Simbas' doesn't feel right, but that's the closest I can come.”

The room went silent, as if waiting for Cross to finish.

“Look,” the gang leader said, very softly, “I know it's all guessing about…them. But they're not pulling Mural Girl's strings. I don't know why they're protecting her, but she's not just some channel for their messages—she's got her own story to tell.”

“For the bangers, maybe,” Ace added. “Something about unity, you think? Even the biggest gangs, they're all broken down into sets now. There's no central leadership, like before. And that spot Mural Girl works in, only time you
don't
hear gunshots is when some fool's using a silencer.”

“Mural Girl is telling about the failure of a revolution,” Rhino squeaked. “Too many generals, not enough soldiers. No shortage of martyrs, though. Or of informants, either.”

“Hemp isn't the key to any of this,” Cross said, his voice as flat as ever. “There isn't enough money in Chicago to make him send a hit man after Sharyn. He was a dead man as soon as he gave the word.”

“Boss, he
had
to know that,” Buddha said. “Kind of like Mural Girl was saying. Everyone had to…I don't know…maybe
play
a part to
be
a part, okay? But maybe Hemp wasn't going for that. Maybe he wanted it all. Not enough for the sets to just consolidate, they all had to be slinging for
him.
That was the deal he put out there: anyone who doesn't get the message gets dead.”

“Shows that he can take out anyone who doesn't go along? That's what Ace was for? Send
that
message?”

“Send it, yeah, that would do it…
if
he pulled it off. But say he did, he'd have to get all of us to make that work, and—come on, who's
that
crazy? What was his plan? Set up a PO box in a graveyard? Turn zombie and open a bank account?”

“Is it possible this Hemp was not actually responsible?” Tracker asked.

“He's sure as hell responsible for the hit ticket,” Cross answered. “The one who let
us
know, the guy who thought he was gonna get paid—paid by us—he spelled it out. And it went down just like he said it would.”

“Who's ‘us'?” Ace said. “Doesn't matter who picked up on the rolling bounty we got out there, me,
I
wasn't told.”

“You wouldn't be cold enough,” Tiger said. “I know that's your rep, and you earned it. But compared to
this
one”—she nodded her head in Cross's direction—“you're always on full boil.”

“It was the tactically correct decision,” Rhino said, to defend the only man he had ever dared to trust while in captivity. “Sharyn was never in danger. She was inside, with her children, in the safe room. I was behind the front door, Buddha at the back. The only thing actually in the yard was a speaker system. If the informant was wrong—or lying—it would not have changed the result.”

“So what's next?” Ace asked, grimly.

“Whatever it is, we have to wait for it,” Cross said. “Whoever put this game together, they're not some ghetto grabbers. For them, Hemp wasn't a player; he was a chip.”

THREE DAYS
later, the entire crew was assembled in the back room of Red 71.

Cross stood facing the others—a blue marker in his right hand, a blank whiteboard to his left. To a casual observer, he might have been the head of an ad agency, brainstorming with his team.

“It's been quiet,” he told the group. “Nobody's made a move. Waiting, that's fine. But it can't be permanent. So let's see what that leaves us.”

“Guesses?” Tiger snarled. “That's what we're down to now?”

“No,” Tracker said. “We have to start eliminating what we can before we—”

“—start eliminating everything that's left,” Ace sliced in.

Cross patted the air in front of him with both hands, in a “Calm down!” gesture.

The black-masked Akita made a sound deep in its throat.

“Ssshh, Sweetie,” Princess told the dog, patting its triangular head. “It's gonna be okay.”

If any of this made the gang leader impatient, he didn't show it.

“One,” he said, writing the number on the whiteboard, “it
was
Ace they wanted. But they'll never try Sharyn's house again.”

“And it wouldn't matter if they did,” the slender man in his trademark black Zorro hat and matching leather duster said. “I sent them all back down home—
Sharyn's
home, I'm saying. She still owns that little piece of land where she was born. Her daddy has a place there. He's a real old man, but he ain't never lived no place else. Got himself a lot of respect. People down there, they'd take a hard look at
any
stranger. If they didn't like what they saw, he wouldn't be a tourist no more; he'd be there to stay.”

“Two,” Cross went on, as if Ace hadn't spoken, “the real target was Hemp. He was a dead man from the second he gave that blackout order.”

“That would be too elaborate,” Rhino squeaked. “Anyone who could hire Hemp to murder someone could hire someone else to murder
him.
Why move in circles? Why involve us at all?”

“So what's ‘three'?” Tiger snapped.

“There's more than three,” Cross said, calmly. “I don't know how anyone could have wanted Sharyn dead. Who gains from that?”

“Yeah, I was wondering when you'd get to that,” Buddha said, bitterly. “We all know how the Trust was set up. Everything's in my name. This dump, the Double-X, the—”

“So?” Tiger cut him off.

“So it's a tontine. The way it works, if we're all gone, everything's supposed to be split between Sharyn and So Long. And you all think she'd—”

“There's a safety net under that,” Cross said. “You know it, I know it…and So Long, she knows it. Nobody's greedy enough to steal the money to finance their own funeral.”

“Ah, he's right,” Buddha said. “So Long, she knows how it would work. I'm not saying she was happy about it when I told her, but she's got nothing to gain from Sharyn being dead. I mean, all of us, we're still alive and—”

“She would not be,” Tracker finished the sentence.

“You think Mural Girl knows what this is about?”

“How could she? She's got her own messages to spread. But that…that hologram thing or whatever it is, that's tribal. And not on this plane. Something parallel to us, as near as I can figure.”